Tuesday, May 31, 2016

After 18 months of hard work, Applied OLAP is proud to announce the general availability of the Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System, version 7, and the all-new Dodeca Excel Add-In for Essbase.

The Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System provides customers the ability to automate spreadsheet functionality, reducing the risk of spreadsheet errors while increasing productivity. It combines unprecedented ease-of-use for business users using spreadsheets for planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting and analysis tasks. It also provides a robust, programmable development environment enabling companies to create spreadsheet applications tailored to their specific needs.

The new Dodeca Excel Add-In for Essbase was created as a drop-in replacement for the classic Essbase add-in and is the world’s only Excel add-in focused exclusively on Essbase. The new add-in supports the most common actions used by Essbase traditionalists, supports the corresponding VBA functions, and includes a built-in Excel ribbon. Early adopters have also been impressed by the speed of retrieving data, commenting they found the Dodeca Excel Add-In as fast as, or even faster, than the classic Excel Add-In for Essbase. It is supported for Excel 2010, 2013, and 2016 and for Essbase 9.3.1 and higher.

Dodeca 7 includes new features and functionality for security, selectors, logging, and enhanced workbook scripting.

The enhanced security features add the ability to more easily manage users, roles, and permissions to access a Dodeca application. The new security features include:

User Management – You can now track, monitor, and control user access to a Dodeca application and more easily monitor your Dodeca user base. This feature enables customers to control individual user access to a specific application, enable users for admin access, and manage user mapping to roles while also tracking metrics such as the first, last, and count of user logins. This feature also logs metrics on the users system to enable Dodeca administrators to more easily support their users.

Here is an example of the metrics stored for each user record.

User Roles – In addition to provisioning roles via Essbase, Microsoft Active Directory, or LDAP groups using Dodeca authentication services, you can now create your own groups directly in Dodeca and map them to users. In addition, these new roles can be configured to be additive to the roles provided by other authentication services.

Application Session Timeout – You can now prevent users from keeping a Dodeca session open indefinitely by specifying an inactivity timeout or by specifying a designated shutdown time.

The new logging features provide the ability for customers to both easily track what their users are running in the system and assist our support team if and when support is needed. The new logging features include:

View Usage Logging – View usage is now automatically logged in the server. The logs include not only identifying information for the view and the user, but also include performance information, error information, and tokens used in the view generation.

Client-side Request and Response XML Logging – The XML traffic traveling between the client and the server may now be logged to a directory on the client machine. This logging expands on the Server-side Request and Response XML Logging to make it easier to gather the XML traffic for a single user. In turn, the XML captured can be used by our support team to easily replicate transactions for our developers if and when necessary.

The selector enhancements include improvements to both view selectors and member selectors. The improvements include:

View Selector Relational Hierarchy Generation – You may now populate the entire View Hierarchy, or alternatively, populate one or more branches, based on the results of a relational query.

View Selector Hierarchy Item Access Filters – Previously, you could control the View Hierarchies available to a given user. This new filter provides the ability to control which view hierarchy items are presented in the view selector based on the current user’s roles.

Relational Treeview Point-of-View Selector List– You may now configure a hierarchy of point-of-view items based on the results of a relational query.

Enhanced Essbase Treeview Point-of-View Selector List Expansion and Selection Filtering – You can now filter Essbase member content and selectable status based on one or more specified filters including generation number, level number, member name, alias, or shared status.

View editing enhancements make it even easier to create and modify Views in Dodeca:

Enhanced SQLPassthroughDataSet Query Editing – You can now define token values to use for testing tokenized SQL queries in the Test Data Set utility.

Improved Token Editor – You can now view and edit tokens and their values in an improved grid layout.

Workbook scripting functionality adds more flexibility to Dodeca via 108 events that provide the opportunity for customers to extend Dodeca, 116 configurable methods (actions that can be taken in response to the events), and 138 functions that provide extended information to the workbook script.

The new workbook script functionality includes:

New Events

BeforeBuildExecute - Allows a workbook script to cancel the build before the view is covered.

BeforeRefreshExecute - Allows a workbook script to cancel the refresh before the view is covered.

Shown - Raised when the view is initially shown. The event is raised before the framework applies the view’s AutoBuildOnOpen property, which allows a workbook script to set the property dynamically.

New Methods

ExportToExcel – Provides the ability to export view and point-of-view information in an exported Excel file. This information is used to regenerate the view upon Excel file import which enables off-line data entry in Excel with subsequent database updates in Dodeca.

SetSelectorConfiguration - Provides the ability to add or remove a point-of-view selector to/from a view dynamically.

Enhanced Methods

CallWebService – Added a new RESTRequest overload, which allows web service calls to made to RESTful web services.

SendEmail - Added a new ServletSMTP overload, which sends email from the Dodeca server rather than from the client. This is useful in circumstances in which SMTP mail must come from an approved IP address.

IsInCharacterRange - Returns a boolean indicating whether the specified string is limited to the specified character range. This function can be used to detect multi-byte characters in a string.

Enhanced Functions

SheetCount - Added an optional IncludeHiddenSheets argument, which controls whether the returned count includes both visible and hidden sheets or only visible sheets.

For more information, we recommend you download and read the latest Dodeca release notes from the registered section of our website. As always, you may also reach out to us via email or call us at
256.885.4371.

About Me

Despite the fact that I often work half-days (12 hours), I am one of the luckiest geeks in the world. I am married to the perfect wife as she is smart, beautiful and provides a tremendous amount of support that makes it possible for me to do all of the things that I do.